I just couldn’t help adding this November 2013 Wired Magazine article here, and how it’s new teaching methods may be adopted within our community here in Rio Arriba — how a poor 12 year old girl, who lives next to a garbage dump in a border town of Mexico, suddenly got the best Math grades in the entire country — and the majority of her class scored in the 99.99%. I love stories like this!! –Barry Ira Geller, www.RACHC.org Administrator

The Class which scored at the 99.99% of Mexico, Paloma standing.

These students in Matamoros, Mexico, didn’t have reliable Internet access, steady electricity, or much hope—until a radical new teaching method unlocked their potential.

José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland—the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo—“a place of punishment.”

A few weeks ago, I visited Washington and dropped in on our New Mexico Congressional delegation. Senator Tom Udall shared his thoughts on The Constitutional Option, a rules change at the beginning of the next Congress enabling the Senate to move forward with 51 votes.

Nobody yet knows what the next Congress will look like. Blue dogs and conservative Dems are likely to have been obliterated by a mixture of Republicans and Donkeys of the deepest cerulean blue. Rovian corporatists may end up struggling with teapartiers over whether being a Republican means carrying water for CEOs or trying to emulate East Germany while marching about in Nazi regalia.

Who knows what the White House will look like now that Rahm Emmanuel, Davie Axelrod and Larry Summers are bidding adieu.

Will the Constitutional Option play a role in the restoration of sanity?